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Diarrhoea and pneumonia are the leading infectious causes of childhood morbidity and mortality. We comprehensively reviewed the epidemiology of childhood diarrhoea and pneumonia in 2010–11 to inform the planning of integrated control programmes for both illnesses. We estimated that, in 2010, there were 1·731 billion episodes of diarrhoea (36 million of which progressed to severe episodes) and 120 million episodes of pneumonia (14 million of which progressed to severe episodes) in children younger than 5 years. We estimated that, in 2011, 700 000 episodes of diarrhoea and 1·3 million of pneumonia led to death. A high proportion of deaths occurs in the first 2 years of life in both diseases—72% for diarrhoea and 81% for pneumonia. The epidemiology of childhood diarrhoea and that of pneumonia overlap, which might be partly because of shared risk factors, such as undernutrition, suboptimum …